Crypto
A bronze statue of “Satoshi Nakamoto”
A bronze statue of Satoshi Nakamoto (Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images)

Bitcoin treasury company Nakamoto finally completes merger with KindlyMD

Bitcoin has had a busy week, breaking a new all-time high.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

It’s been quite the week for bitcoin, which smashed another record and then crossed $124,000 on Thursday. The asset retreated not long after, however, and is trading around $118,000 Friday morning.

It’s also been a great week for Trump adviser David Bailey, whose bitcoin investment company, Nakamoto Holdings, a new bitcoin-native venture, finally merged with healthcare company Nakamoto late Thursday after a multiday delay. Shares were up over 2% in early trading Friday.

The new entity will keep the KindlyMD name, while Nakamoto becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of KindlyMD that “will operate the bitcoin financial services line of business under the Nakamoto brand.”

In a press release, Bailey said, “Our vision is for the world’s capital markets to operate on a bitcoin standard. Today’s merger represents the beginning of that journey for our company. The merger sets the stage for the next chapter of growth, and we look forward to driving value for our shareholders and advancing Bitcoin adoption globally.”

KindlyMD holds 21 bitcoin, but the merged entity said it would use the $540 million of gross proceeds from the private placement in public equity to acquire more bitcoin. Wasting no time, Nakamoto launched a merch line with some “epic gear,” mimicking Strategy’s move.  

In other bitcoin news:

  • Speaking of Strategy, it has officially and legally changed its name from MicroStrategy. The largest corporate bitcoin holder, with 628,946 bitcoin, rebranded in February.  

  • French semiconductor company Sequans Communications announced “a bold plan to acquire 100K BTC” by 2030. The company launched its bitcoin treasury strategy on July 8 and currently holds 3,171 bitcoin.  

  • Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seemed to walk back comments he made about the bitcoin national strategic reserve after saying on Fox News that the US wouldn’t buy bitcoin for the reserve, which would be funded with “confiscated assets.” The comments sparked a lot of discontent, and Bessent later said on X, “Treasury is committed to exploring budget-neutral pathways to acquire more bitcoin to expand the reserve, and to execute on the President’s promise to make the United States the bitcoin superpower of the world.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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